Michele Lamont

How Professors Think is a book about how committees conduct peer reviews of funding applications on behalf of several research funding agencies in the United States. Peer reviews lie at the heart of academia. As all readers of this journal will know, review panels make use of expert opinions and select ad hoc reviewers to determine which projects and researchers will be granted some of the scarce funds available for social science research. The book is based on interviews with members of such committees, programme coordinators (the bureaucrats), and individual applicants as well as on observations of meetings held by panels in three funding agencies. The main question asked is how the people who evaluate project applications go about doing just that, what they think of their own role and the process that they are part of, and how the committees reach their decisions. At first, it is easy to be dismayed and shake your head a little. Not at the book itself, but rather at the examples Lamont lists of how committee members may be influenced by completely irrelevant personal experiences or preferences: a member who was interested in dancing (as a personal hobby) was very positive about an application for a research project on dance. Another committee member justifies her enthusiasm for a project on songbirds because she was charmed by birds singing some time before the meeting.

Enthusiasm · Hobby · Management · Political science · Public relations · Singing · Sociology · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Excellences et diversités in situ

  Open Access•Y Renisio•Revue de Synthèse•2012

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